Count Folke Bernadotte: Sweden’s Servant of Peace
Folke Bernadotte was a great humanitarian who navigated the perilous path between warring parties, a mission that was to cost him his life.
On 17 September 1948 Count Folke Bernadotte, the first of many United Nations mediators assigned the thankless task of attempting to find a peaceful solution to the seemingly intractable problem of hostility in the Middle East, was assassinated in Jerusalem. He had arrived in the city on a mission to establish a ceasefire between the Arabs and the newly proclaimed state of Israel. His killers were members of the extremist Jewish group Lehi – often called ‘the Stern Gang’ – who had already murdered several British officials and soldiers administering the mandated territory of Palestine before the birth of Israel.
The hopelessness of Bernadotte’s peacemaking efforts was underlined by the fact that his murder was the second attempt on his life that day, the first being carried out by the ‘other side’ in the conflict: a young Arab had shot at his car as he drove from the airport, the bullet passing harmlessly through the vehicle’s bumper. The Stern Gang’s ambush was typically more lethal and efficient. An apparently broken-down jeep was slewed across the road along which Bernadotte’s convoy was travelling, forcing it to halt. Three gunmen emerged, dressed in the army uniforms of the new Jewish state’s defence forces. Two shot out the tyres of Bernadotte’s car, while the third, later identified as Yehoshua Cohen (1922-86), poked a machine gun through the car window and opened fire, killing Bernadotte and his French military aide, André Serot. No one was ever brought to trial for the killing, though after Cohen’s death, two fellow members of the gang admitted responsibility. One of the chief organisers of the assassination was Yitzhak Shamir, who became Israel’s prime minister in 1984.
The death of Bernadotte at the hands of Jewish gunmen was a supreme irony given the Swedish statesman’s leading role in one of the most remarkable humanitarian achievements of the Second World War: the rescue of more than 17,000 people, including many Jews, from Nazi concentration camps in the last days of the war. This Scarlet Pimpernel operation, known as the ‘White Buses’, after the whitewashed Red Cross vehicles used to snatch the captives to safety in neutral Sweden, was carried out with the permission of SS overlord Heinrich Himmler. He was desperately seeking to build up credit with the Allies as a man of mercy and possible future leader of a post-Hitler Germany, rather than the mass-murdering master of terror that he was.
Born in 1895, Count Bernadotte was a member of Sweden’s royal family, the nephew of King Gustav V. He received a military education thought suitable for a descendant of the first Bernadotte to sit on Sweden’s throne – Napoleon’s Marshal Jean-Baptiste – and became active in Swedish voluntary organisations, especially the Red Cross, of which he became vice-chairman. As a neutral ‘Nordic’ nation with close historic ties to both Germany and the western Allies and a humanitarian reputation, Sweden was the focus throughout the war of peace ‘feelers’ put out by both sides. In 1943 Bernadotte organised his first humanitarian mission: exchanging disabled prisoners of war through the Swedish port of Gothenburg.
In March 1945, with the end of the war in Europe weeks away, Bernadotte led his first Red Cross rescue expedition into the Third Reich itself. The original convoy, staffed by Swedish army officers with Red Cross doctors and nurses, plucked some 8,000 Norwegian and Danish prisoners, both their countries having been occupied by the Germans, from Nazi hands. Gradually, Bernadotte expanded the scope of the White Buses. Later convoys rescued 6,000 Poles, two thirds of whom were Jews bound for the gas chambers, including a large contingent liberated from Ravensbrück, the concentration camp for women located near Berlin. Other camps visited by the White Buses included Dachau, Mauthausen, Theresienstadt and Flossenbürg. The convoys, painted bright white and emblazoned with huge red crosses to deter the Allied planes then ravaging Germany, made their perilous journeys bearing their often sick and starving human cargoes to freedom in Sweden.
Naturally, Himmler had not authorised this mass rescue from the kindness of his flinty heart. His aim was to use the prisoners as human bargaining chips with the Allied leaders Churchill and Roosevelt and, after the latter’s death, with the new US President Truman. In head-to-head negotiations, sometimes carried out by candlelight in tents in the grounds of Friedrichsruh Castle, the Swedish Red Cross’s HQ in Germany, Himmler attempted to use Bernadotte as an envoy to carry his ‘peace offer’ to the Allied leaders. In essence, he was proposing that Germany should surrender to the Western Allies – with the proviso that it should continue fighting a ‘defensive’ war against the Russians.
Bernadotte was in a dilemma. He knew that the Allies, publicly committed to their alliance with the Soviet Union and sworn to fighting Germany until she surrendered unconditionally, would reject such an offer out of hand – especially coming from Himmler. But Bernadotte also realised that if Himmler knew how he was regarded in the West the camp gates would slam shut, the White Buses would stop running and the inmates would be left to their fate. So Bernadotte strung Himmler along, promising to convey his olive branch to the West, while his White Buses continued their life-saving work. They did so up to and after the Allied liberation of the concentration camps, the German surrender and Himmler’s suicide following his capture by the British.
After Bernadotte’s murder, his reputation was attacked by Felix Kersten, Himmler’s personal masseur. Kersten had conceived a grudge against Bernadotte who, rightly regarding the masseur as a Nazi, had blocked his application for Swedish citizenship. Kersten’s revenge had been to forge a letter from Bernadotte to Himmler on his own typewriter in which the Swede allegedly informed the SS chief that Jews freed from the camps would be unwelcome in Sweden. Sadly, this forgery was swallowed by the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper – not the last time the historian would be fooled by a Nazi fake – who used it in a 1953 magazine article to blacken Bernadotte’s reputation.
Now, a Swedish historian, Sune Persson of Gothenburg University, claims to have established the truth about Bernadotte and his heroic humanitarian efforts. Persson has tracked down survivors, comparing and evaluating their accounts of a chaotic and traumatic time. Sir Brian Urquhart, a Second World War intelligence veteran and subsequently UN under-secretary, describes Persson’s work, in his introduction to the English edition of the book, Escape from the Third Reich (Frontline Books), ‘as a major contribution to the history of the Second World War and particularly to the involvement of the Scandinavian countries’.
Persson’s investigations, Urquhart adds, have vindicated Bernadotte’s role in a great humanitarian enterprise and his conclusions, ‘backed up by years of tireless research and study’, will lay to rest the calumnies thrown at Bernadotte by those seeking to justify his murder. As a result, his own country, after years of silence, is at last honouring Bernadotte’s achievements. In the words of his surviving sons, Count Folke junior and Count Bertil Bernadotte:
‘If these criticisms had been made during his lifetime, it is certain that he himself would have explained the circumstances … but this opportunity was denied him by an assassin’s bullet.’
